Future of your Business, Family and Wider World by Dr Patrick Dixon, Futurist Speaker, Keynotes on Growth Strategies and Leadership, Lecture Slides, Articles and Videos from Conferences - 15 million unique visitors to MAIN Futurist site (articles / keynotes / videos) - link on right to www.globalchange.com

July 20, 2011

Google Plus and Google Circles – Impact on Search Engine Optimisation, your business and private life

Google Circles hit 10 million members after just 2 weeks of informal invitations and will have a big impact on Facebook as well as how websites are ranked in Google Search.Google Circles is not a simple replacement for Facebook.
Google Circles is rightly called a Project by Google. It is part of a grand re-alignment of our digital futures.
Part of the new Google Project is Google+.Every web page now has a new popularity rating, based not only on how many people have clicked +1 boxes, but also on who those people are, and how well you know them personally. But that means Google has to know who you are, who other people are, and how all the world's relationships mesh together.Relational Relevance is what it's all about - not just relevance of Search keywords to particular ideas or pages.
We can be certain that Google+ scores for each website will have a soon have a significant impact on search listings. What does it all mean for you and your business?

Here is the background to Google Circles:

For many years, Search Engine teams have tried to use personal recommendations and things like click through’s on search results, as part of the scoring process to decide which websites appear highest.
As soon as any new method is used by Search Engines, you can be sure that tens of thousands of people will try to trick it – and that is what happened, with companies selling clicks, recommendations and so on.
Just look at the number of companies who are selling video views and video recommendations to try and subvert YouTube’s search engine.
At the same time, social networks have taken off in a way hard to imagine five years ago – particularly Facebook and Twitter.
To some extent they have both been victims of their own success: many people have more contacts than they can really relate to, all muddled together – work, home, family, close friends, club members and so on. Neither Facebook or Twitter offer any solution other than creating multiple identities which is tedious.
Google responded first to the Search issue over the last year or so by focusing on Facebook LIKE scores and Twitter links. Detailed research suggests that Facebook links are a much more potent driver of Google Search results than Twitter, which is what we would expect.
After all, what would you trust more: 1000 recommendations from your extended Facebook connections, or 1000 Tweets (which could easily be generated by a simple spam machine).
Google has also been worried that many people spend more time on Facebook than they do using Google services.
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